Part 3

Chapter 1

ON the next day, and the days that followed,
Étienne continued his work at the pit. He
grew accustomed to it; his existence became
regulated by this labour and to these new habits
which had seemed so hard to him at first. Only
one episode interrupted the monotony of the first
fortnight: a slight fever which kept him in bed
for forty-eight hours with aching limbs and
throbbing head, dreaming in a state of
semi-delirium that he was pushing his tram in a
passage that was so narrow that his body would not
pass through. It was simply the exhaustion of his
apprenticeship, an excess of fatigue from which he
quickly recovered.

And days followed days, until weeks and months had
slipped by. Now, like his mates, he got up at
three o'clock, drank his coffee, and carried off
the double slice of bread and butter which Madame
Rasseneur had prepared for him the evening before.
Regularly as he went every morning to the pit, he
met old Bonnemort who was going home to sleep, and
on leaving in the afternoon he crossed Bouteloup
who was going to his task. He had his cap, his
breeches and canvas jacket, and he shivered and
warmed his back in the shed before the large fire.
Then came the waiting with naked feet in the
receiving-room, swept by furious currents of air.
But the engine, with its great steel limbs starred
with copper shining up above in the shade, no
longer attracted his attention, nor the cables
which flew by with the black and silent motion of
a nocturnal bird, nor the cages rising and
plunging unceasingly in the midst of the noise of
signals, of shouted orders, of trains shaking the
metal floor. His lamp burnt badly, that
confounded lamp-man could not have cleaned it; and
he only woke up when Mouquet bundled them all off,
roguishly smacking the girls' flanks. The cage
was unfastened, and fell like a stone to the
bottom of a hole without causing him even to lift
his head to see the daylight vanish. He never
thought of a possible fall; he felt himself at
home as he sank into the darkness beneath the
falling rain. Below at the pit-eye, when Pierron
had unloaded them with his air of hypocritical
mildness, there was always the same tramping as of
a flock, the yard-men each going away to his
cutting with trailing steps. He now knew the mine
galleries better than the streets of Montsou; he
knew where he had to turn, where he had to stoop,
and where he had to avoid a puddle. He had grown
so accustomed to these two kilometres beneath the
earth, that he could have traversed them without a
lamp, with his hands in his pockets. And every
time the same meetings took place: a captain
lighting up the faces of the passing workmen,
Father Mouque leading a horse, Bébert
conducting the snorting Bataille, Jeanlin running
behind the train to close the ventilation doors,
and big Mouquette and lean Lydie pushing their
trams.

After a time, also, Étienne suffered much
less from the damp and closeness of the cutting.
The chimney or ascending passage seemed to him
more convenient for climbing up, as if he had
melted and could pass through cracks where before
he would not have risked a hand. He breathed the
coal-dust without difficulty, saw clearly in the
obscurity, and sweated tranquilly, having grown
accustomed to the sensation of wet garments on his
body from morning to night. Besides, he no longer
spent his energy recklessly; he had gained skill
so rapidly that he astonished the whole stall. In
three weeks he was named among the best putters in
the pit; no one pushed a tram more rapidly to the
upbrow, nor loaded it afterwards so correctly.
His small figure allowed him to slip about
everywhere, and though his arms were as delicate
and white as a woman's, they seemed to be made of
iron beneath the smooth skin, so vigorously did
they perform their task. He never complained, out
of pride no doubt, even when he was panting with
fatigue. The only thing they had against him was
that he could not take a joke, and grew angry as
soon as any one trod on his toes. In all other
respects he was accepted and looked upon as a real
miner, reduced beneath this pressure of habit,
little by little, to a machine.

Maheu regarded Étienne with special
friendship, for he respected work that was well
done. Then, like the others, he felt that this
lad had more education than himself; he saw him
read, write, and draw little plans; he heard him
talking of things of which he himself did not know
even the existence. This caused him no
astonishment, for miners are rough fellows who
have thicker heads than engine-men; but he was
surprised at the courage of this little chap, and
at the cheerful way he had bitten into the coal to
avoid dying of hunger. He had never met a workman
who grew accustomed to it so quickly. So when
hewing was urgent, and he did not wish to disturb
a pikeman, he gave the timbering over to the young
man, being sure of the neatness and solidity of
his work. The bosses were always bothering him
about the damned planking question; he feared
every hour the appearance of the engineer
Négrel, followed by Dansaert, shouting,
discussing, ordering everything to be done over
again, and he remarked that his putter's timbering
gave greater satisfaction to these gentlemen, in
spite of their air of never being pleased with
anything, and their repeated assertions that the
Company would one day or another take radical
measures. Things dragged on; a deep discontent
was fomenting in the pit, and Maheu himself, in
spite of his calmness, was beginning to clench his
fists.

There was at first some rivalry between Zacharie
and Étienne. One evening they were even
coming to blows. But the former, a good lad
though careless of everything but his own
pleasure, was quickly appeased by the friendly
offer of a glass, and soon yielded to the
superiority of the new-comer. Levaque was also on
good terms with him, talking politics with the
putter, who, as he said, had his own ideas. The
only one of the men in whom he felt a deep
hostility was lanky Chaval: not that they were
cool towards each other, for, on the contrary,
they had become companions; only when they joked
their eyes seemed to devour each other. Catherine
continued to move among them as a tired, resigned
girl, bending her back, pushing her tram, always
good-natured with her companion in the putting,
who aided her in his turn, and submissive to the
wishes of her lover, whose caresses she now
received openly. It was an accepted situation, a
recognized domestic arrangement to which the
family itself closed its eyes to such a degree
that Chaval every evening led away the putter
behind the pit-bank, then brought her back to her
parents' door, where he finally embraced her
before the whole settlement. Étienne, who
believed that he had reconciled himself to the
situation, often teased her about these walks,
making crude remarks by way of joke, as lads and
girls will at the bottom of the cuttings; and she
replied in the same tone, telling in a swaggering
way what her lover had done to her, yet disturbed
and growing pale when the young man's eyes chanced
to meet hers. Then both would turn away their
heads, not speaking again, perhaps, for an hour,
looking as if they hated each other because of
something buried within them and which they could
never explain to each other.

The spring had come. On emerging from the pit one
day Étienne had received in his face a warm
April breeze, a good odour of young earth, of
tender greenness, of large open air; and now,
every time he came up the spring smelt sweeter,
warmed him more, after his ten hours of labour in
the eternal winter at the bottom, in the midst of
that damp darkness which no summer had ever
dissipated. The days grew longer and longer; at
last, in May, he went down at sunrise when a
vermilion sky lit up the Voreux with a mist of
dawn in which the white vapour of the
pumping-engine became rose-coloured. There was no
more shivering, a warm breath blew across the
plain, while the larks sang far above. Then at
three o'clock he was dazzled by the now burning
sun which set fire to the horizon, and reddened
the bricks beneath the filth of the coal. In June
the wheat was already high, of a blue green, which
contrasted with the black green of the beetroots.
It was an endless vista undulating beneath the
slightest breeze; and he saw it spread and grow
from day to day, and was sometimes surprised, as
if he had found it in the evening more swollen
with verdure than it had been in the morning. The
poplars along the canal were putting on their
plumes of leaves. Grass was invading the
pit-bank, flowers were covering the meadows, a
whole life was germinating and pushing up from
this earth beneath which he was groaning in misery
and fatigue.

When Étienne now went for a walk in the
evening he no longer startled lovers behind the
pit-bank. He could follow their track in the
wheat and divine their wanton birds' nests by
eddies among the yellowing blades and the great
red poppies. Zacharie and Philoméne came
back to it out of old domestic habit; Mother
Brulé, always on Lydie's heels, was
constantly hunting her out with Jeanlin, buried so
deeply together that one had to tread on them
before they made up their minds to get up; and as
to Mouquette, she lay about everywhere--one could
not cross a field without seeing her head plunge
down while only her feet emerged as she lay at
full length. But all these were quite free; the
young man found nothing guilty there except on the
evenings when he met Catherine and Chaval. Twice
he saw them on his approach tumble down in the
midst of a field, where the motionless stalks
afterwards remained dead. Another time, as he was
going along a narrow path, Catherine's clear eyes
appeared before him, level with the wheat, and
immediately sank. Then the immense plain seemed
to him too small, and he preferred to pass the
evening at Rasseneur's, in the Avantage.

And he turned towards a comrade, who always sat at
the bottom table with his head against the wall.

"Souvarine, won't you have one?"

"No, thanks; nothing."

Étienne had become acquainted with
Souvarine through living there side by side. He
was an engine-man at the Voreux, and occupied the
furnished room upstairs next to his own. He must
have been about thirty years old, fair and
slender, with a delicate face framed by thick hair
and a slight beard. His white pointed teeth, his
thin mouth and nose, with his rosy complexion,
gave him a girlish appearance, an air of obstinate
gentleness, across which the grey reflection of
his steely eyes threw savage gleams. In his poor
workman's room there was nothing but a box of
papers and books. He was a Russian, and never
spoke of himself, so that many stories were afloat
concerning him. The colliers, who are very
suspicious with strangers, guessing from his small
middle-class hands that he belonged to another
caste, had at first imagined a romance, some
assassination, and that he was escaping
punishment. But then he had behaved in such a
fraternal way with them, without any pride,
distributing to the youngsters of the settlement
all the sous in his pockets, that they now
accepted him, reassured by the term
"political refugee" which circulated
about him--a vague term, in which they saw an
excuse even for crime, and, as it were, a
companionship in suffering.

During the first weeks, Étienne had found
him timid and reserved, so that he only discovered
his history later on. Souvarine was the latest
born of a noble family in the Government of Tula.
At St. Petersburg, where he studied medicine, the
socialistic enthusiasm which then carried away all
the youth in Russia had decided him to learn a
manual trade, that of a mechanic, so that he could
mix with the people, in order to know them and
help them as a brother. And it was by this trade
that he was now living after having fled, in
consequence of an unsuccessful attempt against the
tsar's life: for a month he had lived in a
fruiterer's cellar, hollowing out a mine
underneath the road, and charging bombs, with the
constant risk of being blown up with the house.
Renounced by his family, without money, expelled
from the French workshops as a foreigner who was
regarded as a spy, he was dying of starvation when
the Montsou Company had at last taken him on at a
moment of pressure. For a year he had laboured
there as a good, sober, silent workman, doing
day-work one week and night-work the next week, so
regularly that the masters referred to him as an
example to the others.

"Are you never thirsty?" said
Étienne to him, laughing.

And he replied with his gentle voice, almost
without an accent:

"I am thirsty when I eat."

His companion also joked him about the girls,
declaring that he had seen him with a putter in
the wheat on the Bas-de-Soie side. Then he
shrugged his shoulders with tranquil indifference,
What should he do with a putter? Woman was for
him a boy, a comrade, when she had the fraternal
feeling and the courage of a man. What was the
good of having a possible act of cowardice on
one's conscience? He desired no bond, either
woman or friend; he would be master of his own
life and those of others.

Every evening towards nine o'clock, when the inn
was emptying, Étienne remained thus talking
with Souvarine. He drank his beer in small sips,
while the engine-man smoked constant cigarettes,
of which the tobacco had at last stained his
slender fingers. His vague mystic's eyes followed
the smoke in the midst of a dream; his left hand
sought occupation in nervous gropings; and he
usually ended by installing a tame rabbit on his
knees, a large doe with young, who lived at
liberty in the house. This rabbit, which he had
named Poland, had grown to worship him; she would
come and smell his trousers, fawn on him and
scratch him with her paws until he took her up
like a child. Then, lying in a heap against him,
her ears laid back, she would close her eyes; and
without growing tired, with an unconscious
caressing gesture, he would pass his hand over her
grey silky fur, calmed by that warm living
softness.

"You know I have had a letter from
Pluchart," said Étienne one evening.

Only Rasseneur was there. The last client had
departed for the settlement, which was now going
to bed.

"Ah!" exclaimed the innkeeper, standing
up before his two lodgers. "How are things
going with Pluchart?"

During the last two months, Étienne had
kept up a constant correspondence with the Lille
mechanician, whom he had told of his Montsou
engagement, and who was now indoctrinating him,
having been struck by the propaganda which he
might carry on among the miners.

"The association is getting on very well. It
seems that they are coming in from all
sides."

"What have you got to say, eh, about their
society?" asked Rasseneur of Souvarine.

The latter, who was softly scratching Poland's
head, blew out a puff of smoke and muttered, with
his tranquil air:

"More foolery!"

But Étienne grew enthusiastic. A
predisposition for revolt was throwing him, in the
first illusions of his ignorance, into the
struggle of labour against capital. It was the
International Working Men's Association that they
were concerned with, that famous International
which had just been founded in London. Was not
that a superb effort, a campaign in which justice
would at last triumph? No more frontiers; the
workers of the whole world rising and uniting to
assure to the labourer the bread that he has
earned. And what a simple and great organization!
Below, the section which represents the commune;
then the federation which groups the sections of
the same province; then the nation; and then, at
last, humanity incarnated in a general council in
which each nation was represented by a
corresponding secretary. In six months it would
conquer the world, and would be able to dictate
laws to the masters should they prove obstinate.

"Foolery!" repeated Souvarine.
"Your Karl Marx is still only thinking about
letting natural forces act. No politics, no
conspiracies, is it not so? Everything in the
light of day, and simply to raise wages. Don't
bother me with your evolution! Set fire to the
four corners of the town, mow down the people,
level everything, and when there is nothing more
of this rotten world left standing, perhaps a
better one will grow up in its place."

Étienne began to laugh. He did not always
take in his comrade's sayings; this theory of
destruction seemed to him an affectation.
Rasseneur, who was still more practical, like a
man of solid common sense did not condescend to
get angry. He only wanted to have things clear.

"Then, what? Are you going to try and create
a section at Montsou?"

This was what was desired by Pluchart, who was
secretary to the Federation of the Nord. He
insisted especially on the services which the
association would render to the miners should they
go out on strike. Étienne believed that a
strike was imminent: this timbering business would
turn out badly; any further demands on the part of
the Company would cause rebellion in all the pits.

"It's the subscriptions that are the
nuisance," Rasseneur declared, in a judicial
tone. "Half a franc a year for the general
fund, two francs for the section; it looks like
nothing, but I bet that many will refuse to give
it."

"All the more," added Étienne,
"because we must first have here a provident
fund, which we can use if need be as an emergency
fund. No matter, it is time to think about these
things. I am ready if the others are."

There was silence. The petroleum lamp smoked on
the counter. Through the large open door they
could distinctly hear the shovel of a stoker at
the Voreux stoking the engine.

"Everything is so dear!" began Madame
Rasseneur, who had entered and was listening with
a gloomy air as if she had grown up in her
everlasting black dress. "When I tell you
that I've paid twenty-two sous for eggs! It will
have to burst up."

All three men this time were of the same opinion.
They spoke one after the other in a despairing
voice, giving expression to their complaints. The
workers could not hold out; the Revolution had
only aggravated their wretchedness; only the
bourgeois had grown fat since '89, so greedily
that they had not even left the bottom of the
plates to lick. Who could say that the workers
had had their reasonable share in the
extraordinary increase of wealth and comfort
during the last hundred years? They had made fun
of them by declaring them free. Yes, free to
starve, a freedom of which they fully availed
themselves. It put no bread into your cupboard to
go and vote for fine fellows who went away and
enjoyed themselves, thinking no more of the
wretched voters than of their old boots. No! one
way or another it would have to come to an end,
either quietly by laws, by an understanding in
good fellowship, or like savages by burning
everything and devouring one another. Even if
they never saw it, their children would certainly
see it, for the century could not come to an end
without another revolution, that of the workers
this time, a general hustling which would cleanse
society from top to bottom, and rebuild it with
more cleanliness and justice.

"It will have to burst up," Madame
Rasseneur repeated energetically.

"Yes, yes," they all three cried.
"It will have to burst up." Souvarine
was now tickling Poland's ears, and her nose was
curling with pleasure. He said in a low voice,
with abstracted gaze, as if to himself:

"Raise wages--how can you? They're fixed by
an iron law to the smallest possible sum, just the
sum necessary to allow the workers to eat dry
bread and get children. If they fall too low, the
workers die, and the demand for new men makes them
rise. If they rise too high, more men come, and
they fall. It is the balance of empty bellies, a
sentence to a perpetual prison of hunger."

When he thus forgot himself, entering into the
questions that stir an educated socialist,
Étienne and Rasseneur became restless,
disturbed by his despairing statements which they
were unable to answer.

"Do you understand?" he said again,
gazing at them with his habitual calmness;
"we must destroy everything, or hunger will
reappear. Yes, anarchy and nothing more; the
earth washed in blood and purified by fire! Then
we shall see!"

"Monsieur is quite right," said Madame
Rasseneur, who, in her revolutionary violence, was
always very polite.

Étienne, in despair at his ignorance, would
argue no longer. He rose, remarking:

"Let's go to bed. All this won't save one
from getting up at three o'clock."

Souvarine, having blown away the cigarette-end
which was sticking to his lips, was already gently
lifting the big rabbit beneath the belly to place
it on the ground. Rasseneur was shutting up the
house. They separated in silence with buzzing
ears, as if their heads had swollen with the grave
questions they had been discussing.

And every evening there were similar conversations
in the bare room around the single glass which
Étienne took an hour to empty. A crowd of
obscure ideas, asleep within him, were stirring
and expanding. Especially consumed by the need of
knowledge, he had long hesitated to borrow books
from his neighbour, who unfortunately had hardly
any but German and Russian works. At last he had
borrowed a French book on Co-operative
Societies--mere foolery, said Souvarine; and he
also regularly read a newspaper which the latter
received, the Combat, an Anarchist journal
published at Geneva. In other respects,
notwithstanding their daily relations, he found
him as reserved as ever, with his air of camping
in life, without interests or feelings or
possessions of any kind.

Towards the first days of July, Étienne's
situation began to improve. In the midst of this
monotonous life, always beginning over again, an
accident had occurred. The stalls in the
Guillaume seam had come across a shifting of. the
strata, a general disturbance in the layers, which
certainly announced that they were approaching a
fault; and, in fact, they soon came across this
fault which the engineers, in spite of
considerable knowledge of the soil, were still
ignorant of. This upset the pit; nothing was
talked of but the lost seam, which was to be
found, no doubt, lower down on the other side of
the fault. The old miners were already expanding
their nostrils, like good dogs, in a chase for
coal. But, meanwhile, the hewers could not stand
with folded arms, and placards announced that the
Company would put up new workings to auction.

Maheu, on coming out one day, accompanied
Étienne and offered to take him on as a
pikeman in his working, in place of Levaque who
had gone to another yard. The matter had already
been arranged with the head captain and the
engineer, who were very pleased with the young
man. So Étienne merely had to accept this
rapid promotion, glad of the growing esteem in
which Maheu held him.

In the evening they returned together to the pit
to take note of the placards. The cuttings put up
to auction were in the Filonnire seam in the north
gallery of the Voreux. They did not seem very
advantageous, and the miner shook his head when
the young man read out the conditions. On the
following day when they had gone down, he took him
to see the seam, and showed him how far away it
was from the pit-eye, the crumbly nature of the
earth, the thinness and hardness of the coal. But
if they were to eat they would have to work. So
on the following Sunday they went to the auction,
which took place in the shed and was presided over
by the engineer of the pit, assisted by the head
captain, in the absence of the divisional
engineer. From five to six hundred miners were
there in front of the little platform, which was
placed in the corner, and the bidding went on so
rapidly that one only heard a deep tumult of
voices, of shouted figures drowned by other
figures.

For a moment Maheu feared that he would not be
able to obtain one of the forty workings offered
by the Company. All the rivals went lower,
disquieted by the rumours of a crisis and the
panic of a lock-out. Négrel, the engineer,
did not hurry in the face of this panic, and
allowed the offers to fall to the lowest possible
figures, while Dansaert, anxious to push matters
still further, lied with regard to the quality of
the workings. In order to get his fifty metres,
Maheu struggled with a comrade who was also
obstinate; in turn they each took off a centime
from the tram; and if he conquered in the end it
was only by lowering the wage to such an extent,
that the captain Richomme, who was standing behind
him, muttered between his teeth, and nudged him
with his elbow, growling angrily that he could
never do it at that price.

When they came out Étienne was swearing.
And he broke out before Chaval. who was returning
from the wheatfields in company with Catherine,
amusing himself while his father-in-law was
absorbed in serious business.

"By God!" he exclaimed, "it's
simply slaughter! Today it is the worker who is
forced to devour the worker!"

Chaval was furious. He would never have lowered
it, he wouldn't. And Zacharie, who had come out
of curiosity, declared that it was disgusting.
But Étienne with a violent gesture silenced
them.

"It will end some day, we shall be the
masters!"

Maheu, who had been mute since the auction,
appeared to wake up. He repeated: